Handing
over your personal data is now often the cost of romance, as online
dating services and apps vacuum up information about their users’
lifestyle and preferences.

Why it matters:
Dating app users provide sensitive information like drug usage habits
and sexual preferences in hopes of finding a romantic match. How online
dating services use and share that data worries users, according to an Axios-SurveyMonkey poll, but the services nonetheless have become a central part of the modern social scene.

What they know:

Everything you put on your profile, including drug use and health status. Web
trackers can examine your behavior on a page and how you answer key
personal questions. JDate and Christian Mingle, for example, both use a
tracker called Hotjar that creates an aggregate heat map of where on a web page users are clicking and scrolling.

Every time you swipe right or click on a profile.
“These can be very revealing things about someone, everything from what
your kinks are to what your favorite foods are to what sort of
associations you might be a part of or what communities you affiliate
with,” says Shahid Buttar, director of grassroots advocacy for the
Electronic Frontier Foundation.

How you’re talking to other people. A reporter for the Guardian recently requested her data from Tinder and received hundreds of pages of data including information about her conversations with matches.

Where you are.
Location data is a core part of apps like Tinder. “Beyond telling an
advertiser where someone might physically be at a given time,
geolocation information can provide insights into a person’s
preferences, such as the stores and venues they frequent and whether or
not they live in an affluent neighborhood,”” says former FTC chief
technologist Ashkan Soltani.

The details:
Popular dating websites broadly collect information on their users for
advertising purposes from the minute they first log on to the site,
according to an analysis by the online privacy company Ghostery of the
websites for OkCupid, Match.com, Plenty of Fish, Christian Mingle, JDate
and eHarmony. (Ghostery, which performed the analysis for Axios, lets
people block ad trackers as they browse the web.)

Popular
services broadly track their users while they search for potential
matches and view profiles. OkCupid runs 10 advertising trackers during
the search and profile stages of using its site, Ghostery found, while
Match.com runs 63 — far exceeding the number of trackers installed by
other services. The number and types of trackers can vary between
sessions.

The
trackers could pick up where users click or where they look, says
Ghostery product analyst Molly Hanson, but it’s difficult to know for
sure. “If \you’re self-identifying as a 35-year-old male who makes X
amount of money and lives in this area, I think there’s a wealth of
personal information that should be pretty easy to capture in a cookie
and then send to your servers and package it and add it to a user
profile,” says Jeremy Tillman, the company’s director of product
management.

Many of these trackers come from third parties.
OkCupid installed 7 ad trackers to watch users as they set up their
profiles. Another 11 came from third parties at the time Ghostery ran
its analysis. Trackers include data companies that often sell data to
other companies looking to target people, Hanson says.

Match
Group owns a number of dating services, including Tinder and OkCupid.
The privacy policies say user data can be shared with other Match
Group-owned services.

What they’re saying: A
spokesperson for Match Group says in a statement said that data
collected by its companies “enables us to make product improvements,
deliver relevant advertisements and continually innovate and optimize
the user experience.”

“Data
collected by ad trackers and third parties is 100% anonymized,” the
spokesperson says. “Our portfolio of companies never share personally
identifiable information with third parties for any purpose.”

The
primary business model of the industry is still based around
subscriptions rather than targeting ads based on personal data, notes
Eric Silverberg, the CEO of gay dating app Scruff.

“I
would argue that the incentive to share information is actually lower
for dating businesses than it is for media businesses and news sites.
… We have subscription services and our members pay us for the
services we provide and the communities we create,” he says.

James Barnley

I’m the editor of the DomainingAfrica. I write about internet and social media, focusing mainly on Domains. As a subscriber to my newsletter, you’ll get a lot of information on Domain Issues, ICANN, new gtld’s, Mobile technology and social media.